INTERNATIONAL: CHINA PILGRIMAGE - Dogen and Hanshan Sites

Travel to China with Sensei Kaz Tanahashi and Sensei Peter Levitt April 18 - May 3, 2017. Visit Tiantong Monastery where the great thirteenth-century Japanese Zen Master Dogen was trained by his teacher Rujing. We also visit the nearby cave where the legendary hermit-poet Hanshan lived and used the cave walls to write his poems.

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What Are We Waiting For? (Part II): Gina Jiryu Horrocks

Sometimes, when I think of this question, it brings an urgency up for me—What am I waiting for? I often think of the night verse we chant here: “Life and Death are of supreme importance,” not to squander my life. And sometimes, you know, I think I’m waiting for something outside myself, somebody to save me, somebody else to have written this dharma talk, (laughs) somebody else to be speaking in front of you. And there’s really nobody, in the end, that comes to save us.

When I think that way, I’m often reminded of Eve Ensler who wrote this book called Insecure At Last, and she tells a story in it about waiting for Mr. Alligator. I’ll share a little bit of that story because that book has been so powerful for me in the past couple years, really thinking about our need for security in such an insecure world and just the false notion of security—it’s just not there. So, in Eve Ensler’s life, she grew up in a family where there was a lot of violence, her father was very violent, and so, in her more desperate moments of waiting, she would call Mr. Alligator to come rescue her. She talked about how this was a short reptilian man who came to the rescue of children… This is what she talks about: “Sometimes she would wait the whole day for him. Of course, he never did show up… Well, that’s not exactly true.” And this is where I’m thinking about how we wait and something in our waiting ripens in us.

So, she talks about, 40 years later, working in Africa where she’s working with the women of the Congo to end violence against women—that’s her work in the world. And there’s a woman that she’s working with named Angus … when she was a young girl, her clitoris was cut off and swore that she would never let that happen to any other woman, any other girl, to lose that freedom. And Eve Ensler, working with her project V-Day, asked Angus, “What can we do for you? What can we do to support you?” And Angus said, “Well, if you could buy me a Jeep, I could get around a lot faster and reach more women,” so V-Day bought Angus a Jeep. And then later, Eve asked what else they could do? And Angus answered, “If you can give me the money, I’ll build a house for these young women and girls to come to and they’ll have a place to run away to and they’ll have money to learn and go to school…”

And then Eve went back to Africa, and there in the middle of this valley was a sign of the Rescue Center for the Schools and it says “until the violence stops.” And when Eve went there, and she stood and she looked, and she realized, she said, she wasn’t waiting anymore. She was dancing and she was crying and she was singing, but it wasn’t waiting anymore. She said, it had taken almost 42 years, but Mr. Alligator had finally come.

And we get rescued by giving what we need the most. And we’re waiting for what has always lived inside of us. So that’s one way to look at waiting through this ripening of something inside of us that has always lived there.